A first rate biography

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair by Anthony Arthur is highly recommended. Sinclair's life was so full of adventure, controversy, ambition and historic significance that it might be harder to make the life uninteresting than otherwise. But Arthur does an admirable job here of walking between two extremes, the passionate approval or disapproval of his subject, which camps had many followers then and now, and I find this book even-handed and convincing in its final evaluations of Sinclair's stature as a writer and historic figure. Some excerpts:

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His public position was that he had created a “beautiful Utopia,” no mean achievement. He had “lived in the future.” When he moved with Meta and David into a New Jersey summer beach cottage, back into the “single-family mode of life,” he thought it was “like leaving modern civilization” and retreating to the dark ages.

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Sinclair leaned toward conspiracy theories for much of his life, occasionally with good cause. But he had spent not just the monetary but the psychic and artistic capital he had won from The Jungle. He had worked hard, winning a reputation for accuracy and common sense, somewhat compromised by excessive zeal. Now the zeal predominated. He was an American Savonarola, attacking too many evils, too indiscriminately and with too much intensity, to be taken seriously.

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A few days after Sinclair returned from jail, he looked through the window of Scott Nearing’s adjacent cabin and saw his best friend and his wife making love. Sinclair now found himself in the first act of what would become a long-running drama. It was the greatest tragedy of his life, not least because for the public at large it was a long-running seriocomic spectacle, a French farce, a scandal almost as juicy as the Harry Thaw / Stanford White / Evelyn Nesbit triangle in 1906.

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More positively, Don Quixote, Sinclair suggests, asks a critical question that is obviously close to his own heart: “What shall be the relation of the idealist, the dreamer of good and beautiful things, to the world of ugliness and greed in which he finds himself?” If he tries to apply his vision of the good, “the world will treat him so badly that before he gets through he may be really crazy.”

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When American Outpost finally appeared, in 1932, Upton Sinclair was fifty-four years old. He had written one epochal novel, The Jungle, and two others of considerable merit, Oil! and Boston, plus half a dozen works of nonfiction that, taken together, constituted an impressive critique of American institutions as a collective “dead hand.” The moment was right for a summing-up, if not a valedictory—and for a corrective reshaping of the impression that Floyd Dell had left with his 1927 biography. Dell’s Freudian interpretation of Sinclair’s life was admiring and sympathetic, but too narrowly grounded in the notion that Sinclair was a puritan and a neurotic.

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Sinclair turned sixty in September 1938. One month later, after nearly four years in search of a proper subject, and at an age when most men retire, he began his new career as a historical novelist. Before that career ended, in 1953, the first year of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, he would write eleven novels about a charming spy named Lanny Budd— a heroic saga admirable both for its achievement and for the unique combination of qualities it required of its irrepressible creator.

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Despite the encomiums of Shaw and Mann, among many others, Sinclair’s books were dismissed by the academy as too popular, too old-fashioned, and too resistant to the tools of literary criticism to be considered as works of art. These objections are valid, but they are overstated and they miss the point. They are overstated because they focus on the poorer examples of Sinclair’s writing instead of the better ones, as this book has tried to do. And they are beside the point because they ignore Sinclair’s effort to reach out to an audience of less well-educated readers without talking down to them, an effort in which he was remarkably successful.